MV Doña Paz — A Ferry, a Tanker, and the Sea on Fire

On the night of 20 December 1987, the Philippine passenger ferry MV Doña Paz, bound from Tacloban on Leyte to Manila, collided with the small coastal tanker MT Vector in the Tablas Strait off Dumali Point, Oriental Mindoro. The Vector was carrying roughly 8,800 barrels — about 860,000 gallons — of gasoline and other petroleum products. The cargo ignited on impact, the fire spread across the strait and through the overcrowded ferry, and both vessels were destroyed within hours. Only 26 people survived: 24 from the Doña Paz and 2 of the Vector’s 13-man crew. By the most credible estimate the dead numbered about 4,386, which makes the sinking the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in recorded history.

The exact toll has never been fixed, and it cannot be. The Doña Paz’s official manifest listed roughly 1,500 to 1,600 passengers, but the ship was carrying a multiple of that number on a pre-Christmas run home. Tickets were routinely sold aboard at a discount and never entered on the manifest; complimentary passengers and small children went uncounted. A 1989 government investigation and later civil proceedings put the figure far higher than the manifest. A 1999 presidential review, working from court records and more than 4,100 settlement claims, supported a total in the region of 4,342 ferry passengers; adding the crew and the tanker’s dead yields the commonly cited ~4,386. This dossier therefore states the toll as an estimate and explains the spread rather than asserting a precise count the record cannot support.

The Philippine Board of Marine Inquiry completed its investigation on 22 March 1988 and found the MT Vector solely at fault. The tanker, the board concluded, was unseaworthy: it sailed on an expired coastwise license and an expired certificate of inspection, with a defective engine ignition system, no third mate, no licensed radio operator, no proper lookout posted, and a master and officers who lacked the licenses their positions required. The ferry’s operator, Sulpicio Lines, was exculpated by the board as to the cause of the collision.

The legal reckoning ran for two decades. In G.R. No. 160219, decided 21 July 2008, the Supreme Court of the Philippines held that “MT Vector was unseaworthy at the time of the accident and that its negligence was the cause of the collision,” fixing liability on Vector Shipping Corporation and its owner, Francisco Soriano, and absolving the charterer, Caltex Philippines, of fault for having loaded its cargo aboard a vessel certified — wrongly — as fit to carry it.